Every now and then I'm newly unnerved by the omnipresence of online analytics engines. The fact that your mailbox ads change to reflect the content of recent conversations, or that you get bombarded with travel specials minutes after searching for a nearby Italian restaurant, is often more unsettling than helpful. These contextual pointers serve as a constant reminder that virtual eyes are tracking and recording your every digital move, and linking it to a central nervous system of personal information.
The potential is both thrilling and a little scary.
Lezette Engelbrecht, online features editor, ITWeb
But it's the price society pays for using those so-called “free” services like Twitter and Facebook, and for companies, it's become all about extracting the quality from the quantity, as data growth breaks every conceivable record.
By 2015, for example, the gigabyte equivalent of all movies ever made will cross global IP networks every five minutes, reckons Cisco. So in the time it takes to make a cup of coffee, the entire cinematic history would have zipped across the interwebs.
In the same year, there will be one zettabyte of data flowing over the Internet. If digits do it for you, that's 10 with 21 zeroes. If they don't, imagine creating an unbroken ring of mountains around the entire Boland plain from Cape Town up to Paarl and eastwards to Sir Lowry's Pass and Stellenbosch, with the ring a tad higher than Table Mountain all around. Fill that “bowl” up to the brim with rice and you have about the same number of rice grains as there are bytes in one zettabyte.
So, a whole bang lot of info whizzing about then. Info that, if analysed properly, translates into huge returns for those who take the time to mine it. Which is why various service providers have invested heavily in compiling a store of information about our personal tastes, relationships and buying behaviour. These elements are integrated with social networking activity, location and conversations to build up a repository of data that can be used to create richer, more intelligent applications.
It could result in an incredibly agile, intelligent power grid that predicts, analyses, and responds in seconds to highly specific information, delivering the kinds of small-scale tweaks that save billions in energy and cost when multiplied. It could also, of course, create some thorny privacy issues, but more on that in a minute.
This level of information exchange will be made possible by the sheer amount of data sources we'll have in future. Cisco predicts the number of devices connected to IP networks will be double the global population by 2015.
Leveraging the connectivity of this networked mass could extend the power of social metrics to the electricity grid, by linking personal and conversational data to energy activities. Smart grids could build personalised energy profiles, down to when individuals use hot water, prepare meals or go on holiday. People could share info on the best time to use appliances or collaborate on energy-saving schemes within their neighbourhoods.
In the world of social smart grids, your car and phone would know when you leave the office and how far you are from home, so they could alert the house's energy system to power up certain appliances. Building systems could pick up from communication between colleagues that a meeting will run late into the night, and adjust light and aircon settings accordingly. Or the fact that you've chatted to friends about hosting them for dinner could see the grid increase power availability to your home, while decreasing it at theirs. Entire communities could be managed in a dynamic way to ensure greater overall energy efficiency.
In the Netherlands, for example, the PowerMatching City project consists of 25 digitally connected homes that both consume electricity and produce it, through heat pumps, smart appliances and electric cars. The amount of energy available within the mini-city is managed through a smart grid that responds to fluctuations and a local energy market controlling and adapting prices. It offers an intriguing model of what a future energy ecosystem may look like.
But while tracking social data could provide a degree of context with significant payoffs energy-wise, it also creates the potential for an invasion of privacy already under threat from the all-seeing digital world. Finding a balance between intelligent energy use and personal security will be a key challenge.
Nonetheless, a recent Oracle report on smart grids stresses that data will be as important as energy itself in the future power system. If green house gas reduction targets are to be met, smart grids will have to successfully interpret data and align power supply and demand accordingly.
As the data tsunami grows, along with energy demands, transforming the glut of information into something useful and actionable could make or break the power supply system. Web companies have become mighty skilled at doing this in the social arena; why not use those lessons to create the kind of data intelligence we could all benefit from.
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